Studies on the Origin of Divine and Resurrection Christology

Chapter 1 is Andrew Loke, a theologian at Hong Kong Baptist University, recapping two earlier monographs and answering critics. The first is The Origin of Divine Christology (Cambridge, 2017) — Origin. The second is Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Routledge, 2020) — Investigating. Both ask: how did “the human Jewish preacher Jesus of Nazareth come to be regarded as truly divine and bodily resurrected”?

“Divine” means truly divine. “Resurrection” means bodily. Loke’s method is transdisciplinary: historical-critical study, psychology, comparative religion, analytic philosophy. The chapter takes each prior book in turn.

The argument of The Origin of Divine Christology

Six families of theories

Loke sorts every existing explanation into six families. Two trace divine Christology to pagan influence: Early Evolutionary, defended by Wilhelm Bousset, the early-twentieth-century German pioneer of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule (“history of religions school”) in Kyrios Christos (1913); and Later Evolutionary, defended by Maurice Casey, the late British New Testament scholar at the University of Nottingham. Two more locate the change inside Jewish tradition: Early and Later Unfolding. James Dunn, the late Lightfoot Professor at Durham, defended a Later Unfolding view. The fifth is the Explosion view: divine Christology was the conviction of the earliest Palestinian community. Larry Hurtado, the late Edinburgh historian of early Christian worship, grounded one sub-version in religious experience without a pre-Easter divine claim from Jesus. The other sub-version says they did perceive him as claiming it. The sixth is the Combination approach. Bart Ehrman, religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, defends one in How Jesus Became God: disciples came to think Jesus divine after the resurrection, and the conviction deepened over decades.

Loke argues he has refuted every option except the second Explosion sub-version. His positive thesis runs in two steps. The earliest Christians regarded Jesus as truly divine because they thought God demanded it. They thought that, as Loke puts it on p. 11, because “a sizeable group of earliest Christians perceived that Jesus claimed and showed himself to be truly divine, and they thought that God vindicated this claim by raising Jesus from the dead.” Two locks: a pre-Easter divine claim, and the resurrection as God’s vindication.

Fourteen historical considerations

Loke supports this with fourteen considerations. Belief in Jesus’ true divinity was already present among the earliest Christians — Jews committed to monotheism and a strict Creator-creature divide. Worshipping another figure alongside the Father was the most disruptive move such Jews could make. It was widespread among the earliest leaders, with no trace of disagreement. They argued publicly about plenty else, so silence is meaningful. Worship of a recently followed human is unlikely to have started with the disciples themselves. Even if some had floated it, the rest would not have followed without Jesus’ approval. The idea was hard to start, hard to sustain, and carried social costs. Best explanation: the disciples were following Jesus’ own self-understanding.

Replying to Joshua Jipp on Jewish monotheism

Joshua Jipp, professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, complained that Loke “largely asserted, rather than argued for” his view. Jipp pointed to four scholars who reject Richard Bauckham, New Testament scholar emeritus of St Andrews, on the Creator-creature divide. Loke answers that Origin chapters 2 and 3 already engaged them. The core text is 1 Corinthians 8:6, read with Romans 11:36 (“from him and through him and to him”) and Isaiah 44:24 (God “alone stretched out the heavens”). Together they place Christ on the Creator side.

The longer reply targets Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor emerita of Scripture at Boston University. Fredriksen treats Jesus as YHWH’s “lieutenant,” invokes texts picturing multiple gods (Psalm 82), and argues biblical thought has no doctrine of creation from nothing. Loke’s reply has four parts. Romans 11:36 and Isaiah 44:24 force the conclusion that God alone is creator. Paul’s ascription of creation through Christ in 1 Corinthians 8:6 thus places Christ within the being of the one true God. The gods of Psalm 82 share features with YHWH but stay on the creature side. Romans 1:18-25 states the divide explicitly, condemning humanity for having “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” And Genesis does not affirm eternal preexisting matter. The Dead Sea Scrolls already attest creation from nothing, and Philo contains its basic outline. Fredriksen also worries ex-pagans could not have decoded delicate scriptural allusions. But Paul had spent months teaching them a Romans-style theology of one creator God. First-generation readers caught the Isaiah echo; later readers, lacking that catechesis, missed it.

Exalted mediator figures and the disanalogy with Jesus

Anthony Giambrone, Dominican professor of New Testament at the École biblique in Jerusalem, called this question “the true kernel of the debate.” Loke pairs Christ on the Creator side in 1 Corinthians 8:6 with Christ’s preexistence in the morphē of God in Philippians 2:6. That places Jesus beyond every Jewish exalted figure. Adam, Moses, and Enoch are the closest analogues, but none is described as involved in creating all things or preexistent in God’s morphē. The disanalogy is decisive. Giambrone’s other complaints Loke treats as bare assertions.

How widespread was early divine Christology?

Craig Blomberg, distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Denver Seminary, pressed Loke on this. Paul considered the Jerusalem saints fully Christian, assumed their authority, and proclaimed the same gospel — so Paul’s highest Christology was Jerusalem’s. The non-Pauline first-century writings confirm it.

William Lamb, Vicar of the University Church in Oxford and a New Testament scholar, missed Loke’s discussion of when an argument from silence is valid. The silence carries weight only when the conclusion would almost certainly have broken it. Most of the fourteen considerations do not depend on silence anyway. Lamb appealed to Haile Selassie and the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneersohn as parallels — but those show widespread disagreement among the closest leaders. That is the opposite of earliest Christianity.

Loke quotes Dale Allison, the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary:

“No follower of Jesus, to our knowledge, ever called Paul divine or reckoned him a god. . . . We should hold a funeral for the view that Jesus entertained no exalted thoughts about himself.” (p. 15)

The quotation matters because Allison is no apologist for orthodoxy. His concession lands inside a serious historical-critical study.

On the Gospels, Origin argues that John 8:58 and John 20:28-29 imply Jesus affirmed the highest Christology. Mark 14:61-64, paired with Mark 2’s forgiveness of sins, implies a Jesus accused of blasphemy. He was saying and doing things that imply a claim to be truly divine.

Michael Bird, the British-Australian New Testament scholar at Ridley College in Melbourne, wanted more on the diversity of christologizing. Loke points him to A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation and to Origin‘s treatment of angelomorphic Christology. Diversity of expression does not undermine agreement on the core conviction. Not every early-church belief required Jesus’ personal authorization. But Christ’s identification on the Creator side does.

The pre-Easter claim and the post-Easter recognition

The most consequential paragraph here is Loke quoting himself from Origin:

“It can be argued that Jesus did claim to be truly divine ‘pre-resurrection,’ but this was not widely accepted by his disciples until after the resurrection appearances. This is understandable, for given their Jewish monotheistic faith, it would have been much harder for them to believe that a flesh-and-blood figure was also truly divine than to believe that he was (say) a human Messiah.” (p. 15)

Ken Akagi had asked why early Christians regarded Jesus’ teaching this way. The appearances were “the final pieces of evidences which caused them to believe that God had vindicated Jesus’ ‘pre-resurrection’ claims through the miraculous resurrection.” For ancient Jews, only God could raise a body. So the resurrection counted as divine vindication.

The argument of Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

Mapping every option

The second half recaps the resurrection book. Loke quotes Allison calling the resurrection “the prize puzzle of New Testament research.” His own contribution is a binary tree of mutually exclusive options. The forks ask several questions in sequence. Did anyone claim to witness the risen Jesus? Legend denies it. Did they experience something? No Experience denies it. Was the cause internal or external? Intramental groups all internal causes — hallucination, subjective vision, enthusiasm, illumination. If external, was it Jesus’ body? Mistaken Identity denies it. Did Jesus actually die? Swoon or Escape denies it. Every “no” is a naturalistic alternative; the final “yes” is resurrection. Three claims are now consensus: Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, soon afterwards a number of people had experiences they believed were appearances, and the body was missing.

Considerations against every naturalistic alternative

Each naturalistic branch must answer a long list — nine historical and five general. The earliest Christians faced persecution and were willing to die for their report. Bodily resurrection was central to their preaching. They feared being judged false witnesses. They checked eyewitnesses. They were networked across cities. The Matthean guard story would have been self-defeating as a fabrication.

The general points cut sharper. No group sacrifices everything for what they themselves do not believe. Without external sensory stimulation, many minds would not converge on the same details. Hallucination, mass hysteria, and false memory typically yield insight only after the experience ends. No human can naturalistically cause his body to manifest the New Testament’s “transphysicality.” A half-dead Jesus could not have convinced followers he was risen. The cumulative case: the tomb was empty, no naturalistic hypothesis works, and what the disciples encountered was Jesus’ body.

What “resurrection” meant

Critics objected that “resurrection” was used in many ways, and that Loke had flattened the diversity. Loke replies that he never claimed every term included a corpse. The decisive question is which view Paul held for Jesus. James Ware, professor emeritus of religion at the University of Evansville, supplies the linguistic point. The Greek verb egeirō (“raise”) is used of someone physically dead in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. In that usage, Ware argues, it “refers unambiguously to the reanimation or revivification of the corpse.” So 1 Corinthians 15 already implies an empty tomb. The saints in Matthew 27:52-53 fit the pattern. 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 uses Jesus as the model for believers’ glorified-immortal bodily resurrection.

John Granger Cook, professor of religion at LaGrange College, argues that “Paul could not have conceived of the resurrection of Jesus without assuming an empty tomb” (p. 18). Cook traces strong Jewish bodily-resurrection texts (Isaiah 26:19, Daniel 12:2-3, 2 Maccabees 7) and pagan analogues. Yet pagan culture remained widely skeptical. Stoics had no category for it. Aeschylus wrote that “once a person has died . . . there is no return to life.” That is why some Corinthians were skeptical in 1 Corinthians 15:12. They expected a disembodied afterlife, not a re-embodied person.

Was Paul’s experience purely internal?

The longest argument in the chapter defends the physical reality of Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ. Critics argued for a “subjective spiritual” experience on three grounds. First, Galatians 1:15-16 calls it an apokalypsis (“unveiling”). Second, ōphthē (“he appeared”) in 1 Corinthians 15 does not require physical sight. Third, Acts portrays Paul’s companions seeing or hearing differently than he did.

On apokalypsis, the word means an unveiling of the things of God, with no restriction on mode of perception. William Lane Craig, an evangelical philosopher of religion, notes it “would at the most indicate that the appearance had subjective elements, not that it was wholly subjective.”

On ōphthē, Loke distinguishes a “supernatural appearance” from “spiritual seeing” without physical sight. Josephus’s report of the Temple doors opening on their own was supernatural, but witnessed by physical eyes. Licona’s study of over a thousand occurrences of horaō (“see”) shows it commonly signifies normal physiological sight. Ōphthē appears in 1 Maccabees 4 of Judas Maccabeus with three thousand men. It appears in Acts 7:26 of Moses appearing to two Israelites. Both are physical seeing. The same verb in 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 governs an appearance of a person with a body.

The objection that 1 Corinthians 15:44 calls the resurrected body “spiritual” misreads the context. Paul’s skeptics deny bodily resurrection altogether, not the type. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” (v. 50) is parallelism for “the perishable.” If Jesus’ body had been merely spiritual, the rebuke in v. 12 would be pointless. Greeks had no problem with disembodied spirits.

Loke strengthens the case from 1 Corinthians 9:1. Paul uses the perfect-tense heōraka for his own seeing of the Lord. Alan Segal, the late Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Judaic Studies at Barnard College, summarized: Paul “emphasized that his vision was equivalent to normal ‘seeing,’ just as you and I might see each other.” That is why Paul could use it to mark apostle from non-apostle. Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland’s Professor emeritus at Oxford, shows that Jewish and early Christian sources are suspicious of dream and visionary claims. Paul claimed spiritual visions elsewhere (2 Corinthians 12), but 1 Corinthians 9 is the kind ordinary believers cannot claim. Paul’s “five hundred at once” rules out subjective hypotheses.

On Acts, Loke prioritizes Paul’s firsthand testimony in 1 Corinthians 15 over Acts as a secondary source. Optasia in Acts 26:19 — often translated “vision” — can mean “exhibiting oneself to view.” Acts 9:8 reports Paul’s eyes blinded after the encounter, an extramental effect. The disciples in Luke 24 watched the risen Jesus eat fish. The conclusion is firm: “the claim that Paul’s original experience was purely intramental is pure speculation. It is not supported by the usage of the terms apokalypsis, ōphthē, or optasia, nor by the portrayal of the appearance in Acts” (p. 24). Paul uses ōphthē for every appearance in 1 Corinthians 15. So the Twelve, the five hundred, and the other apostles also physically saw the risen Jesus.

Was Paul converted by a lightning strike?

Allison briefly dismisses an old suggestion: Paul was struck by lightning on the road to Damascus. Loke takes it more seriously. Lightning can cause temporary blindness, can trigger hallucinations, and ancient cultures took it as a divine message. The hypothesis: Paul was nearly struck while thinking about Jesus, hallucinated, and concluded Jesus must be divine. Loke’s replies puncture it. Ancient writers used astrapē for lightning. Acts 9, 22, and 26 use phōs (light). The blinding came after the seeing, not during. The required joint sequence is wildly improbable, with no analogous case in history. The hypothesis also fails to explain the other appearances or the empty tomb.

Did Jesus actually die?

Recent revivals of the Swoon Hypothesis come from Khan and Javadi (2020), who argued Jesus survived with healing herbs. Even on the most generous medical assumptions Jesus would have died of dehydration and shock. David Friedrich Strauss, the nineteenth-century German theologian, had disposed of the hypothesis on theological grounds long ago. A half-dead Jesus limping from nail wounds would not have convinced anyone he was the risen Lord of life.

Khan and Javadi also charge that a six-hour death timeline is “scientifically invalid.” Loke turns to the standard medical study by Edwards and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That study puts crucifixion survival between three or four hours and three or four days. Survival was inversely related to severity of scourging. Pilate’s surprise that Jesus was already dead (Mark 15:44) is because he had not seen the full scourging.

Crucifixion was Josephus’s “most pitiful of deaths” and Cicero’s “most cruel and disgusting penalty.” It was preceded by brutal torture. Craig Keener, professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, catalogs the instruments. The Roman flagrum had twisted iron, chains, and metal balls. Lashes were loaded with knucklebones and lead. Whipping alone could kill. The only known case of crucifixion survival in antiquity is Josephus’s three friends, taken down on Titus’s orders. Even with physician’s care, two still died.

The death of Jesus is multiply attested. Tacitus, Lucian, Josephus, all four Gospels, several Pauline letters, the apostolic fathers, and the Gospel of Peter all report it. Paul’s tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 dates no later than AD 55. Even Gerd Lüdemann, the late atheist scholar at the University of Göttingen, conceded “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” Robert Miller, a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, called it “as certain as anything in history can be.” Pinchas Lapide, the late Orthodox Jewish theologian, called it “historically certain.”

What happened to the body?

If Jesus genuinely died, what became of the body? Allison’s most recent monograph suggests theft by tomb robbers. He concedes no proof. But ancient tomb robbery was a thriving industry. Body parts were used in magical recipes. The Nazareth inscription confirms grave-theft as a real social problem. Loke has an independent argument for the historicity of the Matthean guards (Matthew 27-28) which Allison did not engage. Keener notes graves were robbed by removing stones — but never with guards posted, unless the guards were first subdued, normally fatally. Tomb robbers took wealth; carrying off the body was so rare it would shock anyone. Grave robbing was both impious and a capital offense.

Allison also accuses Matthew of fabricating the resurrection of saints in Matthew 27:51-53. The argument is from silence: the episode appears in no other Gospel, Acts, Paul, Josephus, or pre-Matthean source. But Allison elsewhere warns against arguments from silence. He says N. T. Wright is “nearly alone” in defending the passage, yet himself notes that Harris, Nolland, France, Wenham, O’Connell, and Quarles also accept it. The decisive answer comes from Harris in Allison’s own footnote. The silence of other writers “may simply reflect their conviction that these appearances of ‘many’ holy people . . . were far less momentous and of less apologetic value than the resurrection appearances of their recently crucified Messiah.” That dissolves the argument from silence.

Conclusion

Two arguments will be load-bearing for the rest of the volume. Exalted mediator figures — Adam, Moses, Enoch — are decisively disanalogous to Jesus, who was “involved in the creation of all things and preexistent in the morphē of God.” And Paul’s highest Christology was Jerusalem’s Christology.

On the resurrection side, egeirō of the physically dead means revivification of a corpse. So 1 Corinthians 15 already implies an empty tomb. The terms apokalypsis, ōphthē, and optasia are consistent with Paul’s physically seeing a resurrected body, as is Acts. The lightning-strike, Swoon, and tomb-robber hypotheses fail. Pagan and Jewish skepticism makes resurrection belief hard to explain naturalistically — yet the earliest Christian communities did reach persistent agreement that Jesus had risen.

The remaining chapters engage methodological issues about parallels and historical evidence, frameworks for first-century exegesis (especially Mark), and psychological studies on memory, apparitions, mass hysteria, and pareidolia.

Andrew Loke, associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens with a method claim. Honest study of early Christology tests two things: how Jesus material compares to ancient writings, and source credibility. Chapter 2 takes up comparison.

Loke engages three interlocutors. M. David Litwa, a scholar of Greco-Roman religion at Australian Catholic University, argues the Gospels deploy Mediterranean tropes about gods and divine men. Richard Carrier, an independent historian writing for Sheffield Phoenix Press, argues Jesus never existed. Raphael Lataster, a religious-studies lecturer at the University of Sydney, swings between mythicism and agnosticism. Loke argues they mishandle the sources.

Three meanings of “parallel”

The methodological core is a typology. “Parallel” hides three claims, and critics slide between them. The first is shared culture: common assumptions about physicality, a longing for divine rescue, shared expectations about divine power. The second is causal deification: pagan culture caused early Christians to treat Jesus as divine. The third is causal redaction: pagan culture caused Gospel authors to rewrite stories along Greco-Roman lines.

Granting the first does not commit one to the second or third. When critics use “parallels” without specifying which, the typology forces disambiguation.

An engagement with Litwa

Litwa proposes two theses. Early Christians applied Mediterranean traits of divinity to Jesus. And Gospel authors reshaped accounts to look like historiography. Two concessions: Litwa allows historical bases for some Gospel stories, and he rejects the older claim that pagan influence made Christians call Jesus divine. He argues only that pagan ideas shaped the depiction of an already-recognized divinity.

Loke grants the first thesis but turns the point. The tropes Litwa catalogues — famous contemporaries, real places, eyewitnesses, Luke’s preface — are shared culture. But they are not Luke imitating pagan literature. They are the resurrected Jesus showing physicality the way his culture expects. How else would a truly resurrected Jesus prove physical reality?

The Creator-creature divide

On causal deification Loke pushes back hard. The earliest Christian leaders were strict Jewish monotheists. They worshipped only the Creator and resisted polytheistic logic. Jesus himself recites the Shema in Mark 12:28-31. Jewish literature mocked paganism, and Galilean archaeology — stone vessels, purification pools, ossuaries — backs orthodox practice.

The word “god” can refer to many things in early Christian Jewish usage. But Creator of all things is reserved for YHWH alone. That is what Loke means by “truly divine” — the line earliest Christians would not cross.

An objection from Stephen Philips: Old Testament anti-anthropomorphism rules out a truly divine Jesus. Loke replies that this does not preclude more than one person within YHWH, one of whom takes on a human nature. Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic culture at UC Berkeley, has argued that Daniel 7 already allows a plurality of persons in divinity.

Here Loke draws a key distinction: permissibility is not plausibility. That an idea was conceptually available is one thing. That a particular person was God incarnate is another. Loke’s positive thesis: early agreement on Jesus’s divinity traces to leaders seeing that YHWH had vindicated him by raising him from the dead.

Moses, Enoch, and deification traditions

Litwa cites Moses and Enoch as Jewish deification traditions. But neither was involved in creation, nor preexistent in the form of God. Jesus was. The deified-mediator analogy collapses on the Creator side.

Litwa’s earlier We Are Being Transformed argues Paul lets creation share in divinity. But even Litwa concedes “deified Christians” never crossed onto the Creator side. The earliest Christians held with Isaiah that creative power belongs to God alone. Rom 1:18-25 and Rom 11:36 are the evidence. The condemnation of idolatry in Rom 1:25 is no “rhetoric of difference.” It is logic incompatible with pagan practice — especially in Corinth, a center of the imperial cult.

The historiographical-redaction thesis

On causal redaction Loke is sharper still. Litwa addresses Jewish monotheism but not the Creator-creature divide. The two are not the same. Even if every Gospel detail were stylized for Greco-Roman readers, something produced the early agreement we see in Paul. The named witnesses in 1 Cor 15:6 and the suffering-for-nothing logic in 1 Cor 15:17 point to tradition taking itself as reportage.

Loke offers a Muslim analogy. Conservative Muslims resist polytheistic deification yet expect God to work miracles — they affirm Jesus’s virgin birth. Shared expectation of miracle does not collapse into shared deification.

An engagement with Carrier and Lataster

Carrier reads Paul’s “man of heaven” as Philo’s celestial Adam from Gen 1:27. He stitches together “image of God” (1 Cor 11:7), “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15), and “through whom are all things” (1 Cor 8:6). For Carrier, Paul’s Jesus is the first created being — celestial, not Galilean.

Loke replies with a three-step exegesis of 1 Cor 8:6 against Rom 11:36.

“First, in 1 Cor 8:6 the Lord Jesus — like the Father — is distinguished from all things . . . ‘All things’ (creation) is said to come from the Father, Jesus is not part of ‘all things,’ therefore Jesus is not part of creation, i.e., Jesus is uncreated eternal Creator. Second, Rom 11:36 says through God (1 Cor 8:6: Jesus) are all things, and God is eternal and uncreated, therefore Jesus is eternal and uncreated. Third, Rom 11:36 implies that nothing else existed prior to creation, except the being of God. Therefore, Jesus’ being preexistent to creation implies that he was within the being of God.” (pp. 38-39)

“Through (dia) Christ are all things (ta panta)” matches Rom 11:36’s monotheistic formula. The parallel places Christ within the Godhead. The Jewish background (Ps 96:4-5, Jer 10:11-12, Isa 44:24) fixes “all things” as all created entities.

The “image of God” argument misreads Gordon Fee, late professor of New Testament at Regent College. Pauline image-language refers to Jesus’s humanity bearing God’s image. Jesus replaces Adam as true image-bearer. Prōtotokos (“firstborn”) is a metaphor of preeminence, not creation order.

Lataster on doctrinal diversity

Lataster argues each early community could “create the Jesus they desire,” citing docetism. But docetism emerged late in the first century. The mid-century Pauline letters show a unified view.

The modified-mythicist scenario

Loke anticipates a sharper move. Leveraging Boyarin, a mythicist could claim a person within YHWH was later historicized as a Galilean carpenter. Loke offers three replies.

First, permissibility is not plausibility.

Second, no analogous case exists. In all of Jewish history, no group ever historicized a person within the divine being and worshipped him — Jesus aside. Daniel 7’s worship of the Son of Man is vision, not history. The Enochic Son of Man and Philo’s Logos are literary, never worshipped as historicized.

Third, Sabbatai Zevi and the Lubavitcher Rebbe Schneerson are disanalogous. Both were real historical figures, and neither attracted widespread agreement on true divinity.

Loke also folds in resurrection. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem and buried in a tomb later found empty — not, as Carrier argues, killed in outer space. Carrier’s Bayesian calculation rests on flawed exegesis of 1 Cor 8:6 and Phil 2:6-11. Correct that and the prior shifts.

What the chapter establishes

Loke closes with five points. Parallels alone prove nothing about borrowing or historicity — Litwa agrees. Ignoring differences lets one parallel almost any unrelated story. Jewish monotheism made early leaders resistant to pagan deification. The parallel-influence theory cannot account for named witnesses willing to suffer for what they saw. And pagan cases lack the reliability of Luke’s resurrection narrative.

The Creator-creature divide does the central lifting against all three at once. The disciplined response to “but there are parallels” is “which sense — and what is the inferential bridge?”

Andrew Loke opens his longest chapter to answer a charge: biblical historians use weaker evidence standards. The lead opponent is Raphael Lataster, an Australian philosopher and historian of religion at the University of Sydney. He builds on Richard Carrier, an independent American historian known for Bayesian historiography and a Jesus-mythicist position. They say NT scholars lower the bar whenever the Bible is in view.

Lataster picks two embarrassing quotes. David Noel Freedman, a noted Hebrew Bible scholar and longtime general editor of the Anchor Bible series: “We have to accept somewhat looser standards. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can’t really say anything.” And James Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary: historians should “assume a tradition is authentic until evidence appears that undermines its authenticity.” Lataster reads this as credulity.

Lataster borrows from the courtroom. Eyewitness testimony is admissible. Hearsay is not. He maps that onto history through Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century German historian widely regarded as the founder of source-based history. Ranke urged historians to “rely more on narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents.” So Lataster calls the four Gospels “seeming hagiographies.” Without primary sources to compare, he says, no judgment is possible.

Loke replies that the case fails on four grounds.

Reading the legal analogy correctly

Loke begins with a misreading. Lataster says primary sources must be “contemporaneous to the events in question.” Not so. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, the medievalists whose handbook From Reliable Sources Lataster relies on, explain that ancient testimonies were composed for “contemporaries” of the witness — not the event. An eyewitness writing in AD 70 about AD 30 events still counts as primary.

Next is authorship. Lataster claims the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. Loke leans on Simon Gathercole of Cambridge University. Anonymity cannot be inferred from silence. Second-century reception uniformly attributes the four Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Gathercole concludes that “the most likely conclusion to be drawn is that the attributions of authorship are original.” The Gospels were produced inside first-century communities founded by apostles. Markus Bockmuehl of Oxford and Craig Keener of Asbury Theological Seminary call this “the period of living memory.”

Then comes the hagiography charge. The label does not explain bias. Lataster cites Sathya Sai Baba, the Indian guru who died in 2011, as modern embellishment. But Sai Baba is disanalogous. Polytheistic culture. No bodily resurrection claim. His body lies buried today. Same with Haile Selassie and the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn.

Lataster also says the lack of primary sources for Jesus is “very surprising” given his fame. Loke turns this around. If Jesus was famous, and the early Christians produced twenty-seven NT documents within a century, the absence of any first-century Christian primary source would be improbable. Other failed messianic figures didn’t produce twenty-seven documents either. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, Tacitus, the Roman senator and historian writing around AD 116, and Suetonius, the Roman biographer of the Caesars, probably preserve references to Jesus.

Why legal hearsay rules cannot be imported into history

Loke’s central methodological move comes next. Legal and historical standards differ for principled reasons. Hearsay is worthless in court. In history, it counts as secondary evidence — less than firsthand, but still admissible.

Why? Loke draws on legal scholar Mo Zhang, professor of law at Temple University and a comparative-law specialist. Judges face what Zhang calls “social timeliness”: pressing decisions, finite resources, immediate consequences. Historians have hindsight. Legal hearsay rules assume the witness is alive and can be cross-examined. That cannot apply to first-century events.

Loke quotes E. P. Sanders, the eminent American scholar of Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins, via Dale Allison of Princeton Theological Seminary: “I do not regard deliberate fraud as a worthwhile explanation” of Easter faith. That kind of judgment requires hindsight no judge has.

“It would be wrong to simply assume that the legal standard is the gold standard while historical critical scholars (who do not have the opportunity to cross-examine eyewitness but who have the benefit of hindsight) use a lower standard. Rather, different standards should be used in different contexts.” (p. 46)

The law itself recognizes ancient documents need different treatment. Federal Rule of Evidence 803(16) — the Statements in Ancient Documents exception — admits older documents on a simple principle. They “are presumably more reliable because they are less likely to have been doctored up to win a lawsuit.” Applied in Kraft, Inc. v. United States (1994). John Dickson, founding director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, makes the same point. Distance can enhance the portrait. Eighty years for Tacitus. Twenty to sixty for the New Testament. Roman knowledge of Tiberius depends on Tacitus eighty years later, not on primary sources.

“Just as historians would not dismiss the writings of Tacitus as ‘hearsay’ but as secondary sources produced by someone who had carefully preserved some information from (now lost) primary sources, likewise one should not dismiss the writings of (say) the Gospel of Luke just because it is a secondary source.” (p. 46)

Two more points. Ancient Romans valued eyewitness sources — Seneca the Younger says so in his Natural Questions. Luke-Acts uses legal “witness” language (Acts 1:8); Keener verifies the vocabulary. Loke engages the Gospel-genre debate around Richard Burridge, M. David Litwa, Keener, and Helen Bond, plus Werner Kelber‘s older oral-transmission skepticism. Kelber’s 1983 Oral and Written Gospel argued prophetic oral speech crowded history out. He conceded in 1997 that his “Great Divide” thesis was “problematic.”

Against the residual Kelber worry, Loke offers four counter-points. First, the Gospels were written closer to their subject than typical Greco-Roman biographies, which were expected to be accurate inside living memory. Second, the writers weighed sources — Luke 1:2 says so. Christopher Bryan, professor emeritus of New Testament at Sewanee, notes Mark names “known eyewitnesses” three times (15:40, 47; 16:1). Bryan also dismantles John Dominic Crossan‘s “prophetization of history” theory: Old Testament allusion is interpretive; the named eyewitness recounts what happened. Third, the Gospels are “among the most, rather than the least, reliable of ancient biographies.” Fourth, even Litwa concedes the writers were intelligent and readers expected stories deemed real.

Loke closes by answering a misreading from reviewer Kai Akagi. Loke does not assume Gospel reliability. His argument runs through fourteen considerations from chapter 1. None depend on disputed verses like Matthew 28:19–20.

Paul as a primary source for the eyewitness population

Loke turns to Paul. Lataster says Paul “gives us plenty of reasons to doubt his claims.” The failure is Lataster’s.

First, Paul and tradition. Lataster cites Galatians 1:11–12 and 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 to claim Paul never consulted humans. But the Greek parelabon (“I received”) and paredoka (“I delivered”) match Hebrew qibbel min and masar le — the rabbinic terms for formally passing on tradition. Reginald Fuller, the British New Testament scholar who taught at Virginia Theological Seminary, makes this clear. So do Bryan and the older commentary of William Orr and James Walther. James Dunn, the late University of Durham scholar, dated the 1 Corinthians 15 confession “as tradition within months of Jesus’ death.”

Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15 do not contradict. Galatians defends the source of Paul’s gospel — direct revelation. Corinthians defends his continuity with apostolic preaching. Robert Price‘s attempt to set them at odds fails. Scot McKnight, a New Testament scholar at Northern Seminary: in Galatia, source; in Corinth, continuity.

Richard Bauckham, professor emeritus at the University of St Andrews, weighs in: “Paul did not have sufficient power and influence to invent Christianity. The centre from which the early Christian movement developed and spread throughout the ancient world was not Paul, but the Jerusalem church.”

Lataster cites three passages as deceit — 2 Corinthians 12:16, Romans 3:7, 1 Corinthians 9:20–21. Ben Witherington III of Asbury Theological Seminary reads 2 Corinthians 12:16 as amplificatio with irony against Sophist teachers who took fees. Douglas Moo of Wheaton College shows Romans 3:7 has Paul speaking “in a human way” — as a Jewish objector. Gordon Fee, the late Pentecostal New Testament scholar, and Witherington note 1 Corinthians 9:20–21 concerns lifestyle accommodation around food laws. Paul’s “end” is salvation grounded in the resurrection — which requires truth-telling.

Now the load-bearing distinction. Paul is a primary source for the population of resurrection-claimants. Not for the resurrection itself.

This sounds small. It is decisive. The claim that hundreds said they saw the risen Jesus is a claim about those people. Not, in the first place, about the resurrection. Take Bryan’s leopard analogy. If Bill’s mother says she saw a leopard, Bill — who heard her — is a firsthand witness that she made the claim. Whether the leopard was really there is a separate question.

Paul also passed on traditions about Jesus’s earthly teaching. 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17 lines up with Matthew 24:30–32. 1 Corinthians 7:10 echoes the divorce sayings. 9:14 mirrors Matthew 10:10. 11:23–25 matches Mark 14:22–25. Romans 12:14 picks up the love-of-enemies tradition. Michael Labahn, a German New Testament scholar working on the historical Jesus, writes that the early movement was rooted “very deeply in the message and activity of the earthly Jesus.” Keener confirms Paul taught Jesus tradition. “Cephas” surfaces in 1 Corinthians 3:22, 9:5, and 15:5.

The third point follows. If Paul is a primary source for the eyewitnesses, and the Gospels collect their testimony, the Gospels contain primary-source material for early Christology.

The No-Explicit-Statement Principle and why it fails

Now one of Loke’s sharpest arguments — a modus tollens against Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ehrman objects that Paul nowhere says he discussed Easter morning with Peter, James, or John. So we don’t know what Paul learned from them.

The reply is devastating. The same complaint applies to Paul’s identification of James as “the Lord’s brother” in Galatians 1:19. Paul does not say how he reached that either. Yet Ehrman accepts it. The principle behind Ehrman’s skepticism — call it the No-Explicit-Statement Principle — is false. If true, James would also fall.

The positive case is straightforward. Paula Fredriksen, the University of Boston historian of ancient Christianity, puts it cleanly:

“To do history, when we read Paul, means getting outside of his letters.” (p. 52)

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:1 he had seen the Lord. Galatians 1:18–2:14 records his fifteen-day visit with Cephas and his meetings with James and John. He personally knew the eyewitnesses — a firsthand reporter, not a hearsay relay.

The five hundred brethren and Allison’s geographical challenge

Loke turns to the appearance to over five hundred brethren in 1 Corinthians 15:6. Allison raises a geographical problem. The five hundred lived in Israel; Paul’s Corinthians lived in Greece. No record of witnesses traveling abroad or Corinthians crossing the Mediterranean. Some scholars — citing Jonathan Bishop, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, and Ulrich Wilckens — argue verse 6 is a Pauline addition for apologetics.

Loke’s reply has two parts. If Paul added verse 6, that presupposes his belief in its truth. And he could not have been wrong. His apostolic credentials were already being examined (1 Corinthians 9:1–5). Bryan: “the assertion of eyewitness testimony was easily open to challenge unless, as must have been the case, he and the Corinthians knew perfectly well that it was correct.”

Vincent Torley, a philosopher with a PhD from Melbourne who writes on apologetics at Peaceful Science, raises a follow-up. Paul could have gotten the story from a trusted but unverified source. Michael Alter, an independent author whose 912-page The Resurrection Loke rates as “uncritical and sloppy”, sharpens the worry. Travel from Corinth to Jerusalem covered 830 miles by water and 1,500 by land. Dangerous — think Acts 27. Witnesses may have been hiding.

Loke combines several lines. Larry Hurtado, the late Edinburgh New Testament scholar, documented intense Christian “networking” across the Mediterranean. Bauckham notes yearly Jewish travel to Jerusalem festivals. Peter Bolt, an Australian New Testament scholar, has worked through the apostolic-travel record. Rodney Stark, the late sociologist of religion: “anyone could cross the empire from one end to the other in a summer.” On Ronald Hock‘s estimate, Paul covered 10,000 miles. Keener: Corinth held Greece’s largest Jewish population outside Macedonia. Nine of seventeen named NT Corinthian Christians appear in journey contexts.

Allison presses further. Paul could have named witnesses — “your friends Faustinus and Vitus” — and did not. But Paul also does not name the Twelve in verse 5; the reference is understood. Loke clarifies his claim. He is not saying people always check facts. He says people check under certain conditions. Skepticism (15:12). Foundational topic (15:17). High enough cost to die for (15:30–32). Feasibility. All hold for Corinth. Verse 6 is an open invitation to investigate.

Bess, Herod, QAnon, and the WhatsApp principle

Loke turns to skeptic blogger Justin Bess, who has critiqued Loke online with analogies meant to undercut the eyewitness argument.

First, the Herod–John the Baptist analogy from Mark 6:14. Herod thinks the executed Baptist has come back. Bess takes this as evidence that authority figures accept resurrection rumors uncritically. But the disanalogy is plain. Herod faced no persecution. No record of initial doubt. The early Christians faced both — Luke 24:11, Matthew 28:17, the Markan ending.

Second, Islamic suicide bombers, who die for beliefs about Mohammed without being eyewitnesses. Sean McDowell, an Old Testament scholar working on the apostles, makes the obvious point. They were not eyewitnesses of Mohammed’s life. The argument depends on willingness to die for an event one personally witnessed.

Third, the QAnon analogy. Many Americans believed election-fraud claims and were willing to riot. Loke draws two distinctions. Election-fraud belief was not foundational to the broader political identity. Resurrection belief was foundational to Christian identity (1 Corinthians 15:17). And verifying a population of resurrection-claimants is a yes/no question. Election-fraud forensics involves sprawling disputes about voting machines, ballots, and statistics.

“Paul is in effect saying in 1 Cor 15:6, ‘If anyone wants to check this tradition, a very large number of the eyewitnesses are still alive and can be seen and heard.'” (p. 57)

Bess presses a placement objection. If Paul had consulted eyewitnesses, he should have said so at the start or end — not midway. Loke replies that the five hundred were the largest group, the most easily checkable — exactly where pointing readers toward verification makes most sense. Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, in their standard introduction to the historical Jesus, confirm 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 is structured as “an attempt to prove the resurrection of Christ.”

Loke offers his own analogy — the WhatsApp principle. A short text in context implies a large shared background. When Paul writes to Corinthians who know him, his “thin” appeal to the five hundred presupposes a thicker base. Keener supplies parallels: Cicero’s Verrine Orations, Josephus’s Against Apion, the Claudius speech published by Gallic Romans. The Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and Menander Rhetor codify the principle: “appealing to what an audience already knew or agreed on reduced or eliminated the need for demonstration.”

Bess invokes Allison against Loke. But Allison supports him. He says 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 must summarize fuller narratives. Simple curiosity would not let people believe without details. Birger Gerhardsson, the late Lund scholar of oral tradition, agrees: “elementary psychological considerations tell us that the early Christians could scarcely mention such intriguing events without being able to elaborate on them.”

On social-psychology, Bess truncated a “good guess” qualifier in Michael Argyle‘s work on conversion. Marc Galanter, the NYU psychiatrist who wrote the standard text on cults, finds no incompatibility between cognitive truth-claims and spiritual experience. Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, the authors of Rumor Psychology, distinguish urban legends from foundational truth-claims; Bess collapses it. Keener catalogues the ancient false-witness apparatus: Susanna 51–52, Cicero, Sallust, Plutarch. Self-contradiction was disqualifying in Jewish and Roman courts. Paul takes the charge seriously in 1 Corinthians 15:15: “We are even found to be misrepresenting God.”

Peter Kreeft of Boston College and Ronald Tacelli put it bluntly: Paul “could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true.”

Reception in the first and second centuries

Did the early church preserve Paul’s letters as authoritative? Yes. Mass falsification would have killed 1 Corinthians’ authority at once. 2 Peter 3:15–16 treats Paul’s letters as Scripture. Luke-Acts attests Paul’s Christology and Corinthian interactions.

The Apostolic Fathers sit inside Bockmuehl’s “period of living memory” — 1 Clement, 2 Clement, the Didache, Barnabas, Ignatius’s seven letters, Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Shepherd of Hermas, Diognetus, and the fragments of Papias and Quadratus.

Their treatment of Paul is reverent. Outi Lehtipuu, senior lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Helsinki and author of Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead, notes the language. 1 Clement: “the greatest and most righteous pillar.” Polycarp: “blessed and glorious.” 2 Peter: “our beloved brother.” Paul Foster of the University of Edinburgh documents the Ignatian reception. Ign. Rom. 4.3: “I do not command you like Peter and Paul. They are apostles.” Lehtipuu: “no traces in the sources of a struggle over whether to approve or dismiss Paul.” Pseudo-Clementine literature is the only counter-example — later, Ebionite, silent on resurrection.

1 Corinthians is the most widely and accurately cited Pauline letter — by 1 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and the Shepherd of Hermas. 1 Clement 47:1–3 cites it explicitly.

This is where the reception-survival argument bites. If falsehoods had been visible to motivated readers — and the Apostolic Fathers were such readers — they would have killed 1 Corinthians’ authority. They did not.

Loke addresses the “trajectories” school of Walter Bauer, James Robinson, Helmut Koester, and Ehrman — early Christology was diffuse. David Wilhite, professor of theology at Truett Seminary: “none of the texts from the Apostolic Fathers collection knows of Ebionites or any adoptionist Christology.” The only possible exception, Shepherd Sim. 5.6.5–7, reads as pre-existence Christology. Matthew Bates of Quincy University places the earliest unambiguous adoption-Christology with Theodotus, late second century. Dan Batovici of KU Leuven notes the Shepherd‘s Christology never names “Jesus” or “Christ.”

Against gnostic readings, Ignatius stresses bodily continuity. Smyrnaeans 2:1: “He suffered truly. He truly raised up Himself.” Direct combat against docetism. Smyrnaeans 3.1–3.3 has the risen Jesus tell Peter to “lay hold, handle Me, and see that I am not an incorporeal spirit.” Jonathon Lookadoo of the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul documents the high-Christology: “the will of the Father and of Jesus Christ our God” (Eph. inscr.); Father–Son union “before the ages” (Magn. 6.1); and “God’s blood” (Eph. 1.1).

Lehtipuu surveys the bodily-resurrection vocabulary. Ignatius: “in the flesh.” Clement of Rome quotes Job: “you shall raise up this flesh of mine.” Polycarp’s Martyrdom prayer same register. 2 Clement: “this flesh is neither judged nor raised.”

Marcus Vinzent argues resurrection was peripheral until 140 years in. Peter Williams of Tyndale House, Cambridge: resurrection was “the common message, belief and identity marker” from the start (Galatians 1:23; 2:7–9; 1 Corinthians 15:11). Lehtipuu and James Ware of Northwestern defend Paul’s reanimation-of-the-corpse picture against spiritualizing readings. Sandra Huebenthal calls the second century a theological “laboratory.” Loke replies with Gathercole on the Gospel of Thomas and Philip Jenkins‘s Hidden Gospels. The noncanonical Gospels are inferior — they depend on Matthew, Luke, and Romans, and were composed mid-second century.

Multiple independent attestation and the contradiction-implies-independence rule

Lataster also complains that few Jesus-tradition units are multiply attested, that independence is “extremely difficult, if not impossible” to establish, and that Gospel anonymity disqualifies the criterion. Carrier agrees. John Gager of Princeton adds that multiple attestation “will not establish anything beyond its early date.”

Loke replies in stages. Multiple attestation is never the sole tool; combined with primary-source considerations, it carries weight. The standard Mark-priority objection — Matthew, Luke, John rewrite Mark — does not apply to the resurrection appearances. Mark ends at 16:8, before the appearances. The earliest source, 1 Corinthians 15:3–11, predates Mark and establishes the group appearances independently. Michael Licona of Houston Christian University charts the cross-attestation. Peter’s appearance shows up in Mark 16:7 and Luke 24:34. The “Peter” / “Simon” variation points to different sources. The appearance to the Twelve shows up in Luke and John. Group appearances run across Matthew, Pseudo-Mark, Luke, and John.

Now the anti-collusion argument. If X depends on Y, X is unlikely to contradict Y in ways that make the underlying claim harder to believe.

“If source x is dependent on source y, it is unlikely that it would contradict its own source (y) in such an extreme way that makes it more difficult for other people to believe in view of the apparent contradiction. Thus the speculation about collusion is refuted.” (p. 65)

The Gospel narratives have apparent contradictions with the 1 Corinthians 15 creed. No women in the Pauline list. No James appearance in any Gospel. Allison spots this. The contradictions imply independence, not derivation. They refute Lataster’s claim that the Gospels just elaborate Paul.

The same logic refutes Mark Goodacre of Duke University on the Luke-uses-Matthew hypothesis. Luke contradicts Matthew on appearance location. So Luke cannot be a simple Matthean expansion. Keener: “The differences in accounts demonstrate that the Gospel writers were aware of a variety of independent traditions.”

Loke walks Ehrman’s Easter-narrative discrepancies. First to the tomb. The stone. An angel or man or two men. Galilee versus Jerusalem. James Crossley calls location the deepest contradiction. Loke pieces it together. Luke 24:11 records unbelief. Jesus appears in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36–43). The disciples return to Galilee (Matthew 28:16; John 21). Keener explains the early Jerusalem stay through Jewish mourning customs — seven days, fitting John 20:19. Romans 15 and 1 Corinthians 16 confirm Jerusalem as the center.

Against Géza Vermès on Luke 24:49’s “tarry” command, Licona notes Luke compresses the Easter-to-Ascension narrative for stylistic reasons. Acts 1:3 reports a forty-day period. The “tarry” command was likely given after the Galilean appearances. Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe reach the same conclusion.

The “alien abduction” disanalogy is worth pausing on. Alien stories overlap because they draw from shared cultural images — gray skin, large eyes, examination tables. The resurrection accounts are different. John 20, Luke 24, and 1 Corinthians 15:5 refer to the same group, the Twelve. Same sequence: death, burial, Peter, the Twelve. Even if Matthew 28:16–20 describes a different occasion, it references the same people. They corroborate structurally even where details differ.

The five summary arguments

Loke closes with five formal arguments. Each builds the same conclusion: the earliest Christians sincerely reported what they took themselves to have seen.

First, psychological. DiFonzo and Bordia identify four conditions for careful conclusions. Skepticism. Importance. High cost of false confirmation. Reputation on the line. All four hold at Corinth: 15:12–13, 15:17, 15:30–33, and Paul’s apostolic self-defense throughout. So the probability he got it right is high.

The second turns on Paul’s network. If Paul knew the eyewitnesses, and the Corinthians knew he knew them, he could not have falsely claimed those people saw the risen Jesus. Falsehood would have collapsed under inquiry. The letters show that network. Galatians 1–2 records the Jerusalem visits. 1 Corinthians 1:12 mentions loyalties to Cephas. 9:1–5 records his interactions with the apostles. 15:6 appeals to public knowledge. The group appearances are well-evidenced.

The third is an inference to the best explanation through reception. If Paul’s claims had been false, they would have been checked. Checking would have surfaced contradictions. Contradictions would have killed 1 Corinthians’ authority. But 1 Corinthians was preserved by the Apostolic Fathers and was the most-cited Pauline letter. So the claims are true. The argument works despite assuming hostile intra-Christian opposition.

The fourth is multiple independent corroboration refined through the anti-collusion principle. Multiple early independent corroboration is good evidence for the appearances. The reasoning passes through the Galilee-Jerusalem and women-versus-no-women contradictions, which establish independence.

The fifth previews chapter 5: sociological. Widespread, persistent belief in resurrection inside severe persecution required more than rumor. It required “solid” evidence — group encounters with the risen Jesus.

The methodological core in one sentence

Loke’s chapter does for source-criticism what Hurtado did for sociology. It shifts the burden of proof. The lower-the-standards charge dissolves into category errors — about hearsay rules, primary sources, and what a contradiction supports. Paul was a firsthand witness of the population of resurrection-claimants. The Gospels contain primary-source material because they collect that testimony. The Apostolic Fathers’ reception attests 1 Corinthians’ authority. Contradiction implies independence. The case rests on principles a careful historian — not just a careful Christian — would accept.

Loke names three interlocutors. J. R. Daniel Kirk, an American New Testament scholar trained at Duke and formerly of Fuller Theological Seminary, argues in A Man Attested by God that the Synoptics portray Jesus as an “idealized human figure.” Matthew Larsen, a cultural historian of religion at Yale University, argues in Gospels Before the Book that Mark is unfinished hypomnēmata. Larry Hurtado, the late professor of New Testament at the University of Edinburgh, raised a “multitude of objections” to Loke’s philosophical-theological categories.

Assessing Kirk’s “idealized human figures” thesis

The title comes from Acts 2:22 — “a man attested to you by God.” Kirk’s “idealized human figures” are non-angelic, non-preexistent humans playing a unique role for God or creation. His 130-page survey of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, and Jewish apocrypha catalogs exalted patriarchs, divine-agency figures, and royal-messianic uses of “Son of God.” None of the features Kirk catalogs — worship, sovereignty, divine judgment, applied YHWH texts, divine attributes — implies ontological divinity. Loke pushes back six ways.

Bowing down and 1 Chronicles 29:20

Kirk reads bowing before the king as worship. Bowing is context-dependent. Ps 96:4–5 grounds YHWH’s worthiness in being Creator. No Second Temple text ascribes a creative role to humans. Jesus is the sole exception.

Hurtado’s literary-versus-cultic distinction

Speculation about exalted Adam, Jacob, Moses, or the Son of Man in the Similitudes of 1 Enoch is a literary phenomenon. No Jewish group practiced cultic reverence to these figures. Hurtado calls the Similitudes “imaginative scenes, dreams of some future time of divine victory, not reflections of the actual devotional practice of any second-temple Jewish group.” He continues:

“If we are historians of religion, and not simply comparing literary motifs, the actual historical appearance of the devotional pattern reflected . . . in earliest Christian texts is a genuinely novel and therefore remarkable historical development.” (p. 77)

Mark 2 and the forgiveness of sins

Kirk says John the Baptist (Mark 1:4–5) and the disciples (Mark 11:25) also “forgive sins.” But — as Elizabeth Shively, formerly of the University of St Andrews and now professor at Baylor’s Truett Seminary, notes — John performs a purity rite (Lev 4:20, 26), and the disciples forgive interpersonally so that God may forgive. Jesus offers unmediated divine forgiveness. That is why his words draw the blasphemy charge. Adam Winn, chair of biblical and religious studies at Samford University, adds a “two powers in heaven” reading. Mark 2, 6, and 14 imply Jesus understood himself as truly divine.

Matthew’s “concession”

Kirk himself concedes that Matthew’s Christology “stands poised to transcend the mould of idealized human figures and stake a claim to divinity.” Richard Bauckham, emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St Andrews, extends the point: Kirk’s category cannot accommodate Matthew.

Shively and Pawl on category compatibility

Shively notes that Kirk never shows why Jesus’s full humanity must exclude his divinity. “Royal Christology” and “Divine Christology” are compatible. Timothy Pawl, a philosopher at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, presses the point: “non-angelic representative” does not rule out divine. Synoptic silence on preexistence is not evidence of non-preexistence.

The methodological cordon

Kirk wants a “historically viable reading” of the Synoptics. But bracketing Pauline letters hides how Jesus’s linguistic community understood him. By the 50s CE — “a couple of decades or more earlier than the Synoptics” — Paul presupposes Jesus’s exalted status and dyadic worship across “various circles.” Hurtado writes:

“I find no various indication in the Synoptics that the emphasis on the earthly career of Jesus was promoted as a conflictual alternative over against the sort of Christological beliefs and devotional practices that we see in other first-century texts.” (p. 78)

Three contributions beyond Hurtado

Loke advances past Hurtado in three places. First, he defends widespread early agreement on Jesus’s divinity. The earliest christological debate, in the late first century, was docetism — which itself affirmed Jesus’s divinity. Second, the conviction was generated by Jesus’s own claims, refuting Hurtado’s “Religious Experience Hypothesis.” Third, Loke offers functional but not ontological subordination, a category Hurtado neglected. Combined with Phil 2:6–8, it absorbs Kirk’s “attested, empowered, authorized” emphasis without contradicting highest Christology. Loke also charges Kirk with “anachronistic theological and philosophical motivations” — Nestorian and Eutychian worries. The Kryptic Model of Incarnation avoids these.

Mark 14:62, Psalm 110:1, and the Danielic Son of Man

Dale Tuggy, an analytic philosopher and biblical unitarian formerly of SUNY Fredonia, reads Mark 14:62 as Jesus accepting God’s right hand as a mere human. Loke offers three replies. First, the historical Jesus would have corrected the high priest’s blasphemy verdict. He did not. Second, if Mark were heard as low Christology, traces of a first-century debate would survive. None do. Third, James M. Hamilton, professor of biblical theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, shows in With the Clouds of Heaven that roughly seventy Old Testament instances of “coming on clouds” mark YHWH theophany. There is no precedent for deputizing the role.

Kirk’s Rev 11:12 counterexample fails. The martyrs ascend after God calls them, in the cloud — disanalogous to Daniel 7’s autonomous arrival. Kirk’s “with the clouds, not on” reading ignores Dan 7:13. The son of man arrives with clouds before coming to the Ancient One. He is divine in his own right. The Dan 7:14/7:27 reuse seals it: “all peoples, nations, and languages” serve the son of man — a verb elsewhere reserved for service to God (Dan 3:12, 14, 17–18, 28; 6:17, 21). Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, adds the 1 Enoch Son of Man traditions (1 En 61.8; 62.2, 5; 69.27, 29; 46.5; 48.5; 62.6, 9), where he exercises judgment and is worshipped.

On Tuggy’s possible “YHWH speaks to Adonai” reading of Ps 110:1, Loke replies that the Danielic Son of Man is distinct from the Ancient of Days yet truly divine within the One God of Israel. Mark applies both Ps 110:1 and Dan 7. “God” or “YHWH” can denote any truly divine person. This leaves room for divine plurality within unity. “Sitting at the right hand” is a metaphor for power, not a literal posture.

Assessing Larsen’s hypomnēmata thesis

Larsen reads Mark as unfinished hypomnēmata preserving incompatible Christologies. Loke grants the reading of Mark 6:45–52. As Adela Yarbro Collins, Buckingham Professor Emerita of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School, shows, walking on the sea, “passing by,” and egō eimi (“I am”) echo the Exodus theophanies and the divine name.

But Larsen reads Mark 10:17–18 — “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” — as Jesus “flatly” denying his divinity. The same phrase appears in Mark 2:7, where Jesus responds by performing the divine action. Here, Larsen says, he uses it to deny.

Loke draws on Simon Gathercole, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Cambridge, in The Preexistent Son. Jesus is not denying his goodness. He is pressing the rich man to examine his standard. Calling Jesus good implies his divinity. The man’s later address — just “teacher” (v. 20) — shows he has not yet seen this. The disciples’ surprise (Mark 10:23–31) is at soteriology, not Christology. Widespread early agreement also blocks Larsen’s reading.

Larsen also appeals to Telford’s catalog of titles — Nazarene, Teacher, Rabbi, Lord, Holy One of God, Son of David, Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, servant. He uses “contradictory” sloppily. A contradiction is “A and not-A at the same time.” Authoritative teacher and charismatic prophet do not contradict. Phil 2:6–11 absorbs the catalog: Christ in the morphē of God (“form” or “essential nature”) takes up a human nature with various roles.

Engaging Hurtado on the process of Jesus-devotion

Hurtado’s first objection: cultic reverence of Jesus is post-Easter, so resurrection experiences — not pre-resurrection teaching — are generative.

Loke says Hurtado misread him. He did not argue that the resurrection caused fuller remembering. He argued that the appearances were the final evidence making Jesus’s pre-resurrection claims convincing. This is “not ‘special pleading'” because “in the ancient Jewish setting it would have been reasonable for them to remain unconvinced . . . until and unless something utterly astonishing (such as ‘Jesus’ resurrection’) happened.”

Loke does not propose a “secret divinity.” Matt 14:33 — “those in the boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God'” — with the egō eimi of 14:27 (compare John 8:58), may show pre-Easter worship. Hurtado dismisses Matt 14 as redactional. Loke counters that “if a purported event meshes well with an author’s redactional motive, then the author made up the event” is unjustified.

The methodological core is the necessary/sufficient distinction. “God raising Jesus from the dead” is necessary but insufficient. “Jesus claimed to be truly divine” is necessary but insufficient. Jointly they are sufficient. This concedes Hurtado’s necessary condition while denying its sufficiency.

Hurtado adds, “the crucial matter was what God had declared about Jesus.” Loke agrees — but the question is how they knew. A sizeable group perceived Jesus’s claims and God’s vindication via resurrection. Without Jesus’s own claim, “the divinization of Jesus would have been rejected by the earliest Christians as a serious falsification of Jesus’ intention and a violation of God’s will.”

Hurtado appeals to Qumran fragments — 4Q471b, 4Q491c, 4Q427, the “Self-Glorification Hymn” with claims like “who is like me among the gods.” Loke reserves “truly divine” for the Creator side of the Creator-creature divide. Qumran exaltation language can apply to creatures. The New Testament’s claims about Jesus “would be a major step up from the sort of exaltations described in the Qumran texts cited by Hurtado.” That is why Loke did not engage them.

Hurtado claims that “outside of the Gospel of John, it is difficult to find statements in which Jesus explicitly declares that he is a divine being and should be worshipped.” He treats Matt 28:16–20 and Luke 24:44–52 as the risen Jesus. Loke marshals pre-resurrection passages, citing Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary; Sigurd Grindheim, a Norwegian New Testament scholar at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences; N. T. Wright, senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and former Bishop of Durham; and Aquila H. I. Lee, lecturer in New Testament at Biblical Graduate School of Theology in Singapore. Following Michael Kruger, president and professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, the John/Synoptic gap is “not a matter of substance but a matter of emphasis or directness of expression.” Loke’s summary is striking: Jesus did not say “Hey guys, I am God.” Rather, “He caused his Jewish believers to worship him, and he accepted their worship” (Matt 14:27, 33; Luke 24:52), and “He caused his Jewish unbelievers to think that he is blaspheming in the sense of making claims that only God the Creator can make” (Mark 2:6–7; 14:61–64 par.).

Philosophical and theological categories: the Hurtado email exchange

Loke chides Anthony Giambrone, O.P., professor of New Testament at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem. Consensus failure stems from divergent presuppositions, not missing material. Raphael Lataster, an associate lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney, is a case study: he admits a secular commitment to Christianity’s falsity, kept as advance guard against “providing ammunition to their traditional rivals, Christian apologists.”

The core exchange is reproduced as private email correspondence. Hurtado opens:

“I fear that your invoking of 4th century philosophical categories as a lens through which to interpret first-century NT writings will not find much support among NT scholars. Yes, if we work with these later questions and categories, then the unique inclusion of Jesus as (co)recipient of cultic devotion, the attribution to him of the role of agent of creation, etc., will seem to demand the kind of ontological inferences that you affirm: e.g., Jesus must be a ‘person’ in the ‘being’ of ‘God,’ along with ‘the Father,’ another ‘person’ in that ‘being.’ But this kind of statement will likely seem to many NT scholars anachronistic as a way of reading NT texts with respect for their own historical situation.” (p. 87)

Loke’s reply is structural. He argues from contemporary or earlier texts — Rom 1:25; Ps 96:4–5; Isa 44:24 — not later categories. The biblical authors had ontology. Creation belongs only to the Creator (Isa 44:24). So attributing creation-agency to Jesus implies ontological divinity. The anachronism charge fails on its own terms.

Hurtado rejoins that the chain of inferences “is not itself in the NT.” A “being” inclusive of multiple “persons” is “an anachronistic use of later categories . . . likely [generated] by political developments such as the introduction in the late 3rd century of multiple figures comprising the office of Roman emperor.” He closes with his “much more limited agenda”:

“I’m simply trying to understand in their own terms, and within the limits of the texts, what earliest believers said about Jesus and how they reverenced him . . . I see you as trying to fit all of this into a larger theological framework. The latter is a valid exercise, of course, but it is distinguishable from my own, much more limited agenda.” (pp. 87–88)

Loke’s reply runs along several tracks.

Same project, parallel labels

Loke too reads earliest believers in their own terms. Did they worship Jesus? Yes. Did they think him preexistent? Yes (Rom 1:25; 1 Cor 8:6; Rom 3:30; Mark 14:36). In Loke’s definitions, this is “one being of God with (at least) two persons” — though those definitions differ from fourth-century usage. If the words offend, swap them for “the one God” and “subjects who could communicate.” But that is “overly pedantic.”

The genetic fallacy charge

Hurtado’s complaint — that categories are inappropriate because generated from later discourse — “commits the genetic fallacy.” The same logic would invalidate “ancient Jewish monotheism,” which was generated from twentieth-century Anglo-American discourse. What matters is textual evidence, not the date of coinage.

Hurtado’s last reply

Hurtado parries that “Ancient Jewish Monotheism” is just a label for cultic exclusivity, while Loke is constructing a theological position with what Hurtado calls “obvious indebtedness to 4th century theology”:

“Your project isn’t simply to label some texts, but to construct a theological position . . . the core historical issue between us . . . is whether the historical figure, Jesus, during his earthly ministry claimed to be ‘truly divine’ (your term for ‘God’ or part of ‘God’). I don’t think you make your case as more plausible than the alternative.” (p. 88)

Loke’s final response

If the inferences are implied in NT texts, “we should respect that if we really want to find out what the NT authors thought.” Paul stated one God the Creator (Rom 3:30; 11:36), within whom were two — Father and Christ — both involved in creation (1 Cor 8:6) and able to choose (Phil 2:7–8):

“Instead of saying that I am erecting a theological position that is indebted to fourth-century theology, one should say that I am merely elucidating Paul’s thoughts on which fourth-century theological positions had a certain degree of indebtedness.” (pp. 88–89)

Hurtado’s “label” defense, Loke notes, applies symmetrically to “being” and “person.” Hurtado did not reply further; the exchange ends open.

Loke then turns to Nina Henrichs-Tarasenkova, an instructor in theology at the University of Portland, a sympathetic reviewer suggesting “mutual submission” between Father and Son. The Son did not command the Father; he followed his salvific plan. Functional inequality (Phil 2:6–8) is freely chosen. Ontological equality is preserved.

Conclusion

Kirk’s Jewish texts supply no clear cases of mere humans preexisting or creating. Widespread early agreement that Jesus is on the Creator side governs Mark 10:18 and other hard passages. Functional/ontological subordination, with Phil 2:6–8, absorbs Kirk’s emphases. On Hurtado: Jesus claimed divinity pre-resurrection; pre-Easter worship at Matt 14:33 is plausible; the resurrection appearances were the final convincing evidence, not the originative event. The necessary-but-insufficient logic still holds. On philosophical categories: the chain is text-based; the anachronism charge fails by genetic-fallacy logic.

This is Loke’s longest chapter and his most rhetorically charged. Recent skeptical work leans heavily on psychology. Loke wants to test whether the analogies hold. The most impressive contribution comes from Dale C. Allison Jr., the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. Allison’s The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (2021) is “the fruit of a lifetime’s reflection on ‘the prize puzzle of New Testament research'” (p. 94).

The reception is striking. Gerd Theissen, a New Testament scholar at the University of Heidelberg, calls it “the best book” on the topic. Joel Marcus, professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, calls it “the most interesting and illuminating piece of writing on the resurrection of Jesus.” Allison is no fundamentalist. He is the most sophisticated skeptical voice writing today, and he writes from inside the guild.

Loke’s strategy: grant Allison’s data, then ask whether the analogies work. He focuses on four topics — apparitions, mass hysteria, pareidolia, and memory.

Allison’s reconstruction and his preferred alternative

Allison offers what Loke calls a “dizzying” historical reconstruction. Loke quotes it at length:

“Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, buried Jesus, possibly in a family tomb. Female followers found the entrance open and the body gone. Mary Magdalene had a vision of Jesus. Peter, in Galilee, also believed he had encountered Jesus, probably aware of the story of the empty tomb as well as of Mary’s encounter and presumably her interpretation of it. The apostles returned to Jerusalem proclaiming resurrection. Additional members of the Twelve became convinced. More than five hundred claimed to have beheld Jesus. James and Paul finally reported their own encounters.” (p. 94, citing Allison 336)

Allison concedes these conclusions are “quite conservative within the broader context of critical study of the New Testament.” Yet he holds that “the purely historical evidence is not, on my view, so good as to make disbelief unreasonable, and it is not so bad as to make faith untenable” (p. 95, citing Allison 353).

What does Allison think actually happened? Thieves stole the body. Mary Magdalene hallucinated, “as have others suffering grief.” Her claim triggered something similar in Peter back in Galilee. The frame — “God raised Jesus” — came from Jesus’s own teaching. James and Paul possibly had subjective experiences too. For the collective appearances:

“Maybe mass pareidolia is the explanation. Or perhaps it was a case of mass hysteria. Groups can, in any case, according to their own testimony, share visionary experiences.” (p. 95, citing Allison 340)

This chapter focuses on the collective appearances. Loke handles the stolen-body hypothesis elsewhere.

Apparition studies and bereavement

Allison invokes Dewi Rees, a British physician, whose British Medical Journal study found 47% of 293 widows and widowers reported some contact with their dead spouse. Loke draws a careful line. A hallucination is “a sensory experience which occurs in the absence of corresponding external stimulation.” An illusion is the perception of a real entity, distorted. Rees mentions no collective experience. The 47% is for individuals, not groups.

That brings a load-bearing claim. Joseph W. Bergeron, a physician trained at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, writing with Gary R. Habermas, Distinguished Research Professor of Apologetics and Philosophy at Liberty University, surveyed the peer-reviewed psychiatric literature:

“Collective hallucination is not found in peer reviewed medical and psychological literature.” (p. 95, citing Bergeron and Habermas, “Resurrection of Jesus,” 161)

An email from Gary Sibcy to Mike Licona in March 2009 reported the same across two decades. What about bias toward naturalism? Loke cites the Elsaesser study, where 36.4% reported not being alone and 21.0% claimed a witness. The article uses “surprisingly” — a tell — and admits volunteer self-reporting and no follow-up. Wolfhart Pannenberg, the late German Lutheran theologian, was right that visions cannot all be dismissed as projection. But Allison’s apparition cases remain dissimilar to Jesus’s resurrection.

The Samuel Bull case

Allison considers the Samuel Bull case his strongest. Bull died in 1932 and reportedly appeared to his daughter, son-in-law, and five grandchildren together. Loke pushes back. Investigators did not rule out fabrication for sympathy. The witnesses faced no persecution. And all eight belonged to one family, so “it would not have been difficult for them to make things up in collaboration with one another” (p. 97).

A counter-example sharpens the point. Maria Gonzalez and three companions claimed Marian apparitions at San Sebastian de Garabandal, Spain, in 1961. One later confessed they had used “the trances and apparition claims as a means to get away from the village and play.” The Bull case is not bogus because Garabandal was. The point is that “good faith” certifications cannot rule out fraud.

Tibetan Rainbow Body, and the triple lock

Allison says Rainbow Body evidence is “potentially the strongest of all.” The Dalai Lama recounts the 1998 case of the yogi Achok, sealed in his room for a week and found gone except for his robe. Francis V. Tiso, a Catholic priest who teaches Tibetan Buddhism at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, interviewed three monks; one claimed Achok had later appeared to disciples.

First, a category point. Rainbow Body is not bodily resurrection. Corpses purportedly disappear, leaving only nails and hair. Tiso himself does not rule out symbolism or fabrication. The biography of Simeon Stylites, written within fourteen years of his death, contains miracle stories that “stretch credulity.” Stylites faced no persecution. The Buddhist relic trade and “religious tourism” provide financial incentives — one website claimed over 100,000 attended the puja for Lama Achuk. Persecution by China is nationalistic, not Rainbow-Body-specific. And Rainbow Body is not foundational to Buddhism; the Four Noble Truths are.

That sets up the triple lock. Jesus’s resurrection is foundational to Christianity. Paul says so directly: “If Christ was not risen, then your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:17). Fabricating resurrection-and-divinity claims would have been “the most serious sin of idolatry” for monotheist Jews. And the doctrine “did not help the Jewish cause against the Romans but got them into trouble with other Jews” (p. 98). E. P. Sanders, the late New Testament scholar, conceded the point: “I do not regard deliberate fraud as a worthwhile explanation of Easter faith… several of them would die for their cause.” Foundationality, the idolatry charge, and persecution converge in Jesus’s case but not in Bull or Rainbow Body. The combination does the work.

Bereavement, Pesch, and grief experience

Loke turns Allison’s argument against Rudolf Pesch, the German Catholic New Testament scholar. Easter faith required actual appearances. “Something earth-shattering occurred.” Pesch later withdrew his hypothesis. Sensing the presence of the deceased is common, yet it does not produce new religions. Allison himself: “Typical encounters with the recently deceased do not… lead to the establishment of a new religion.” Stephen Smith notes that within Rees’s data, most reports were merely “sense of presence.”

Greek vocabulary matters. Egeirō (“raise”) in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 “refers unambiguously to the reanimation or revivification of the corpse.” Loke offers a personal note. He has had a sense-of-presence experience of his deceased father. But he does not conclude the body was resurrected. The 1 Corinthians 15:6 appearance “to more than five hundred at one time” requires a public place. The Gospels and Acts report multiple multi-group appearances.

Cognitive dissonance, Hume, and Wright’s gauntlet

Maurice Casey, the late New Testament scholar, suggested the disciples reasoned to resurrection by exegeting Psalms 41, 118, 15, and 110. But 1 Corinthians 15 grounds the claim in what disciples witnessed, not in Old Testament meditation. The list of five hundred implies appeal to testimony. Paul’s false-witness control (1 Cor 15:15) would have throttled fabrication. Cognitive-dissonance fares no better. Grief cannot explain widespread agreement on bodily resurrection plus a divinity claim — and 1 Corinthians 15:6 invites verification.

Peter Millican, Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford, develops a Humean objection. He appeals to “heuristics and biases” — flighty imagination, credulity, motivated deceit — and to research on paranormal believers’ weaker reasoning and false memories. But Loke seizes on Millican’s own concession: “When a specific report has been presented, our assessment cannot just rely on a general abstract probability of error which is independent of the subject-matter” (p. 100, citing Millican 187–88). The specifics tell against him. The disciples were doubtful and fearful. James and Paul were unbelievers. Corinth had resurrection-skeptics (1 Cor 15:12). The earliest Christians distinguished faith from fact (1 Cor 15:17). And Millican’s general objection cannot explain the empty tomb, the mass appearances, or the willingness to die.

Loke clinches the section with N. T. Wright, the Anglican former bishop of Durham, now a New Testament scholar at the University of Oxford:

“Resurrection was not a private event. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.” (p. 100, citing Wright, Who Was Jesus?, 63)

Among the many Jewish messianic movements whose leaders were executed, not one produced a resurrection claim. That is data, not rhetoric. Willi Marxsen, the late German New Testament scholar, complained Loke’s argument implies nobody can find faith today without an appearance. But the premise is narrower. No widespread first-century belief in bodily resurrection arose under persecution without solid evidence. Paul appeals not to “the experience of the life-giving Spirit” — contra Peter Carnley, the Australian Anglican theologian — but to eyewitness testimony.

Eating with Jesus and the solidity of appearances

Even apart from the Gospels — which Allison thinks contain apologetic distortion — the inferential argument holds. The Gospel evidence then strengthens it. Luke 24, Acts 1 and 10, John 20–21, and Ignatius’s Smyrnaeans 3:3 all report eating with causal effects — broken bread, eaten fish — and Jesus showing his hands. James D. G. Dunn, the late Methodist New Testament scholar, defends multi-attestation here. Allison’s own Constructing Jesus endorses repeated-patterns methodology. James Ware, a New Testament scholar, puts it crisply: “There is no fundamental difference between Paul’s conception of the resurrection body and that of the Gospels.”

Allison himself argued that 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 must summarize fuller resurrection narratives told elsewhere. Wright adds that such narratives would have been needed from the start because “stories as community forming as this, once told, are not easily modified. Too much depends on them.” Allison even concedes that Luke 24 and John 20–21 preserve the conviction that Jesus seemed “not ethereal but utterly real, even solid.”

Loke counters parallels with concrete cases. The eight Shakers attached to the Sacred Roll and Book testified to seeing the holy Angel — but the text does not say they saw it together. Allison defended his sources against Gerald O’Collins, the Australian Jesuit theologian, by appealing to an NIMH study confirming the Census on Hallucinations. But that confirmation addresses only the incidence of hallucinations, not collective experiences. The 12% figure for collective apparitions and the Iceland data come from parapsychology, with no persecution context. The Kalish-Reynolds peer-reviewed study (1973) shows only “slightly over 2 percent” reported a shared post-death encounter. The divergence between parapsychology and academic work is itself revealing.

Did the witnesses see the same thing?

Allison objects that Bergeron “appears to assume that the groups who saw Jesus beheld exactly the same thing… yet one fails to understand how anyone can ascertain this.” He reads Matthew 28:17 (“but some doubted”) and Luke 24:38 (“why doubts arise in your hearts”) as evidence of differing experiences. Carnley adds Luke 24:16 — “their eyes were prevented from recognizing him” — as ambiguity.

Doubt texts do not specify cause. Doubt would be natural even if Jesus stood there. It actually helps the case, since it shows the disciples were not gullible. Twenty-five years later, Paul cites them in 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 as testimony to Corinthian skeptics, implying their doubts were overcome. Luke 24:16 attributes the non-recognition to Jesus, not to perception.

Allison argues from Acts 9:7 — Saul’s companions — that not everyone present sees an apparition. He extends this to “all the apostles” in 1 Corinthians 15:7, noting it lacks a number and “at one time.” But “at one time” is also missing from v. 5, the Twelve, which Allison takes as collective. The sequential conjunctions — “then… thereafter… then” — signal distinct events. Gordon Fee, the late Pentecostal New Testament scholar, puts it well:

“The enumerating conjunction ‘then’ and the fact that the appearance to the Twelve was collective, not individual, combine to suggest that a collective appearance (probably with a commissioning) is in view here.” (p. 103, citing Fee, First Epistle to Corinthians, 731)

So three collective appearances must be accounted for: the Twelve, the five hundred, and all the apostles. Acts 9:7 is itself disanalogous. Saul’s companions fall to the ground (Acts 26:14) and hear the voice — that is objectivity, not absence — but Acts does not claim Jesus appeared to them. Luke and Acts trace widespread resurrection belief to group-eating appearances, not the Damascus Road.

Allison further doubts we can know what witnesses precisely saw. Did they “carefully compare notes”? But people hearing of an extraordinary event would have basic curiosity. Paul, in contact with the witnesses, would have asked. Ancient people knew about subjective experiences — Proverbs 23:31–34 describes seeing things after too much wine. Paul’s “at one time” was meant to rule out subjective hypotheses.

Mass hysteria and Marian apparitions

Loke surveys peer-reviewed mass-hysteria literature. Possession-fears, terrorism panics, hysterical dancing, the 1991 Nigerian penis-disappearing epidemic — none involves a group seeing someone together. D. Smith hypothesizes the disciples were “subject to delusions of his presence” on the basis of “a single hallucination by, say, Peter.” This confuses spiritual presence with seeing a body. James Fodor‘s Mass Delusory Hypothesis proposes hallucinations triggering group delusions through “social reinforcement, strong emotions, sensory distortions, and environmental influences.” But Fodor relies on non-academic literature. The article on Pentecostal healing he leans on does not even argue healings are delusional. Its author Stolz writes, “I try to abstain from value judgments.” And the WWI German-air-raid delusions on Canada were non-persistent: “Once their psychological origin becomes evident, they are soon forgotten.”

Loke distinguishes three sub-hypotheses that often blur. First, no-experience plus mass hysteria — the group believed without seeing anything. Second, intramental plus mass hysteria — individuals hallucinated and mistakenly thought it collective. Third, misidentification or illusion plus mass hysteria. None survives the data. Without external stimulus, internal mental states would not align across individuals. Students do not all “see” a non-existent teacher.

What about Allison’s analogies of Fatima and Zeitoun? Even if witnesses say “much the same thing,” he argues, “their collaborative testimony might have emerged from conversations with each other ex eventu” (Latin: “after the fact”). At Fatima and Zeitoun, witnesses “often see different things” and many see nothing. Benjamin Radford, an investigator with the Skeptical Inquirer, drives the point home:

“Thousands of others present didn’t see anything unusual at all… the fact that different people experienced different things — or nothing at all — is also strong evidence of a psychological explanation.” (p. 105, citing Radford, “Lady of Fátima”)

Allison’s mechanism — borrowed from Michael P. Carroll, a sociologist of religion — runs roughly thus. One seer hallucinates. Imitation follows. Witnesses, convinced they all see something, exchange notes and build a consistent report. But the disanalogies are decisive. Marian apparitions had no persecution. Religious tourism provided incentives. The Assumption of Mary was already widespread; apparitions were not foundational to it. Jesus’s resurrection appearances, by contrast, were supposed to originate belief (1 Cor 15:17). The Fatima children initially faced government threats — but three is small, children are more prone to hallucination, and Lucia influenced her cousins. The adult crowds came under sanctioned, financially incentivized conditions, with skeptical counter-traditions on hand. For the disciples, persecution would have given pause, and there were no first-century counter-traditions of disciples leaking they saw nothing. Radford even undercuts the drying-clothes miracle at Fatima: photographic evidence shows no rain, no soaked fabric, no umbrellas.

Sasquatch, Schneersohn, Sabbatai Zevi

Allison cites James Stewart‘s “Sasquatch Sightings in South Dakota,” also cited by Stephen Smith. Both miss Stewart’s actual conclusion. The delusion involved attributing “mysterious, and to some degree anxiety-producing causes” to mundane events — no shared visions. The Menachem Schneersohn and Sabbatai Zevi resurrection claims were minority views, lacked collective appearances, and lacked divine-status agreement. Sabbatai recanted under Ottoman pressure, became Muslim, and many followers agreed they were mistaken — the opposite of Christian behavior under persecution.

Allison argues that a “high concentration of resurrection appearances in a relatively short period of time and then a drop-off” matches mass-delusion patterns. Yet Stewart’s own account cuts the other way. In real mass-delusion cases, believers realize the basic assumption rests on faulty evidence and the episode “quietly disappears.” The earliest Christians did not stop believing.

Why didn’t all first-century Jews convert?

Acts 2:41 and 21:20 portray thousands and “myriads” of Jews believing. Craig S. Keener, F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, defends the historicity. Jerusalem ran to 80,000 or more, swelling to half a million during festivals. Sadducee jealousy is documented (Acts 5:17–18) and fits Mediterranean honor-shame culture. Sadducees had political reasons to oppose resurrection-preaching. Their post-70 disappearance confirms the threat. The Jewish stolen-body counter-claim and unwillingness to fellowship with Gentiles further explain non-conversion. Keener’s Demetrius-and-Artemis example (Acts 19:24–27) shows economic interest fueling persecution. The crucified-God doctrine, as Martin Hengel, the late German New Testament scholar, put it, “would have been regarded by many Jews and non-Jews in antiquity, including the pre-conversion Paul, as a shameless impertinence and absurdity.” Wright again: between 150 BC and AD 150, messianic movements all failed without resurrection claims.

Misidentification

Michael Goulder, the late British biblical scholar, cites moving Marian statues and UFO sightings as illusions. Arif Ahmed, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, in debate with Habermas, cites an attacker-misidentification study where 60% misidentified. But 40% got it right. There was no persecution. It was a one-off survey. The attacker was often a stranger. Three different groups misidentifying a public figure they knew well over multiple occasions is implausible. Allison himself rejects misidentification.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia is, per the Oxford English Dictionary, “the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines” — the man in the moon, faces in clouds, the Virgin Mary in toast. Allison floats it directly: “Did a first-century crowd, naive about pareidolia, look up and marvel at a figure in the clouds?” Eschatological expectation, the empty tomb, and Jesus’s resurrection prophecies could have predisposed the disciples.

Loke’s responses come in three layers. First, ancient people were not gullible about heavenly signs. Titus on a phantom navy put it bluntly: “When once men’s minds have been excited by superstitious fears they easily believe these things.” Allison himself notes that not everyone on the scene saw spectral armies. Even Eusebius admitted Constantine’s cross-of-light was “hard to believe.” 1 Corinthians 15:12 evidences resurrection-skepticism among educated Corinthians.

Second — and this is the key move — Loke distinguishes “perceiving Jesus-like patterns in clouds” from “literally seeing Jesus’s resurrected face.” Modern Christians sharing cloud-Jesus photos do not believe the cloud is Jesus’s reanimated body. Clouds don’t blink, speak, or move like bodies. Keener: “Given the mutability of clouds, reports of shapes in the sky are not the same as… corporate visions or experiences of a person.” The closest scriptural text is Mark 14:62. But Jesus comes with the clouds (Greek meta), not as them.

Third, pareidolia would not survive the persecution-tempered scrutiny Christians faced.

What about reading hyper (“more than”) in 1 Corinthians 15:6 as “above” — implying the five hundred saw Jesus in the clouds? Allison floats this, citing John Chrysostom, the fourth-century church father: “Above is above from heaven.” But Chrysostom is fourth-century, and even he qualified as “some say.” Crucially, Paul was not trying to convince Corinthians of supernatural signs. They already accepted those (1 Cor 12–14). He was trying to convince them of reanimated corpses, which they doubted. Pointing to clouds would have made resurrection more incredible, not less. Eating-with-Jesus narratives have far greater explanatory power. Three groups misinterpreting clouds on three different occasions is implausible.

Memory studies

This is the longest section. Allison surveys memory frailty using Daniel L. Schacter, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard — the “seven sins of memory”: transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Yet Allison also affirms gist-accuracy and “repeated patterns across various characteristics and sources.” For Jesus narratives, he regards “the canonical sources to be further from pristine memory.”

More radical scholars push harder. Herman Philipse, Professor of Philosophy at Utrecht University, argues memory functions as an “updating machine.” Bart D. Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes: “When a group ‘collectively remembers’ something they have all heard or experienced, the ‘whole’ is less than the sum of the ‘parts.'” Zeba Crook, Professor of Religious Studies at Carleton University, deploys the Luddite analogy. Nineteenth-century English workers rallied around “Ned Ludd,” who never existed. Crook: “Collective memories were manufactured.” He pushes further: “There is no qualitative difference between real and manufactured memories.” He has even declared the historical-Jesus quest a failure — “no quest.” Lataster uses memory studies to argue Jesus-agnosticism.

Loke’s responses

Alan Kirk, Professor of Religion at James Madison University, mounts the decisive critique. Memory-distortion experiments are “de-contextualized from the natural social environments.” They use random subjects, isolated from community, recalling unrehearsed material in lab settings. The groups are ad hoc. The distortion is manufactured via deception, lures, and false corroboration. “The effect,” Kirk concludes, “is to blow memory’s proneness to distortion out of proportion.”

Against Philipse’s police-interrogation analogy, disciples could check with one another. They were not isolated suspects. Even radical relativists cry “distortion” at Holocaust deniers. Schudson himself rejects relativism:

“If interpretation were free-floating… controversies over the past would ultimately be uninteresting. But in fact they are interesting… they are gripping because people trust that a past we can to some extent know… really happened.” (p. 113, citing Schudson 361)

Rafael Rodriguez, a New Testament scholar, catalogs Ehrman’s misunderstandings. In memory studies “distortion” is not pejorative. Le Donne’s image of “refractions” — like telescope-lens refractions — is a better term. Ehrman himself concedes: “I am decidedly not saying that all of our memories are faulty or wrong. Most of the time we remember pretty well.”

The Luddite case is disanalogous. Unlike the resurrection — foundational, on which everything depends — the Luddite movement did not turn on whether Ludd existed. Ludd is symbolic. The early Christians’ shocking message would have produced flashbulb memories. Flashbulb experiences, McIver argues, “are crucial in preventing early loss of detail.” Graham Stanton, the late British New Testament scholar, proposed that early Christians wrote Jesus material into notebooks. Judith Redman raises concerns about confidence-spreading and pressure-frozen guesses. But counter-checking would have been intense for a foundational message. Hostile Jewish witnesses would have corrected distortions — and did, with the stolen-body counter-claim. Eyewitnesses served as authoritative control over transmission, as Richard Bauckham, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, has shown. Against Ehrman’s stationary-eyewitness objection, Loke cites early-Christian mobility — festival travel, networking, the missionary circuit. Michael Kruger, the Reformed Theological Seminary New Testament scholar, notes that unreliable apocrypha do not impugn the canonical narratives. Bauckham draws the deeper point:

“At the deepest level, it was for profoundly theological reasons — their understanding of God and salvation — that early Christians were concerned with faithful memory of the really past story of Jesus.” (p. 115, citing Bauckham 277)

The ancient world regarded eyewitness sources as best. Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15:6 appeal — most of the five hundred still alive — proves continued valuation of eyewitnesses. Luke 1:1–4 confirms it. The Loftus-Bernstein childhood false-memory work is disanalogous. Childhood remoteness differs sharply from traditions formulated soon after the event. A misremembered Lord’s Prayer would be corrected next week at church. The Mandela Effect — false memory of Mandela dying in 1980s prison — is also disanalogous: 30-year gap, suggestion-prone conditions, Mandela unfamiliar to most, counter-memories on hand.

Keith and Le Donne on Jesus-memory

Chris Keith, Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, builds on Halbwachs. “Memory is not a simple act of recall, but rather a complex process whereby the past is reconstructed in light of the needs of the present.” All memory is selective and interpretive. Anthony Le Donne, Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary, concludes that “the historical Jesus is the memorable Jesus,” “clearly seen through the lenses of editorial agenda, theological reflection, and intentional counter-memory” (p. 117, citing Le Donne 134).

The Keith–Le Donne approach is more reasonable than Crook-Lataster radicalism. Applied honestly, Allison’s own gist-accuracy method supports a striking conclusion. A sizeable group of earliest Christians perceived Jesus as truly divine. They thought God vindicated this by raising him from the dead. That gist is sustained across patterns and sources.

Allison’s concession — the gold quote

Allison worries that judging all other group-vision accounts counterfeit will lead skeptics to extend that judgment to the New Testament: “The more examples of such delusion and/or deceit surrounding dead bodies that one can amass, the more confident skeptics will be in rejecting the testimony to the resurrection of Jesus.” Loke replies that delusion and deceit are different categories with different criteria. Jesus’s case has unique features — foundational nature, persecution, Jewish monotheistic context — that differentiate it decisively. Then Loke turns Allison’s most striking concession back on him:

“I know of no close phenomenological parallel to the series of likely events as a whole. Early Christianity offers us a missing body plus visions to several individuals plus collective apparitions plus the sense of a dead man’s presence plus the conversion vision of at least one hostile outsider. Taken as a whole, this is, on any account, a remarkable, even extraordinary confluence of events and claims. If there is a good, substantial parallel to the entire series, I have yet to run across it.” (p. 118, citing Allison 346)

This is the strongest skeptical-camp concession in the dissertation. It is one thing for an apologist to say no parallel exists. It is another for the most sophisticated skeptical New Testament scholar of his generation to say it from inside the guild.

The catalog of problems

Loke closes with a cumulative catalog. On parallel apparitions, the literature consistently confuses reasons for doubting sincerity with reasons for proving it. The burden of proof sits on those claiming parallels. Parapsychology and academic peer-reviewed work diverge, and initial suspicion of the former is warranted. Jesus’s case is relevantly different — fraud is excluded for good reasons.

On cognitive dissonance, Scripture-meditation, and prediction-fulfillment, the widespread early belief in bodily solidity was based on what disciples witnessed. The 500-plus would not have embraced the witness list under threat of false-witness condemnation. The hypotheses lack explanatory power and fail to explain the divine-status claim of 1 Corinthians 8:6. And — Wright’s gauntlet — no other Jewish messianic movement post-execution produced resurrection claims. They ended.

The 1 Corinthians 15:7 case supports three collective appearances, not two. Acts 9:7 is disanalogous. Mass-hysteria analogues fail on symptoms (Bigfoot, Sasquatch — no shared visions) and on context (Marian — no persecution, financial incentives, counter-traditions, non-foundational beliefs). Mass-hysteria victims achieve insight and the episode dissolves; the earliest Christians did not stop believing. Why not all first-century Jews converted is overdetermined by jealousy, economic interest, unfulfilled kingdom expectations, dismissal of miracle claims, the cost of persecution, and the crucified-God absurdity. The crucial question remains: what compelled some to believe and proclaim resurrection despite all this?

Pareidolia fails. Ancient skepticism about heavenly signs existed. The clouds-image versus Jesus’s-face distinction is decisive. Three groups misinterpreting clouds independently is implausible. Eating-narratives have far greater explanatory power. Memory studies fail too. Distortion research is contrived and decontextualized. Not all memory is inaccurate. Misrememberers achieve insight rather than dying for their delusion. Luddite and childhood-false-memory disanalogies do not transfer. Jesus’s eyewitnesses functioned as a check-source. Hostile Jewish skeptics provided counter-checks. Networking sustained transmission. Keith and Le Donne carry far more weight than radical skepticism.

Loke’s bottom line is unmistakable. “There are good reasons for thinking that the earliest Christians correctly passed down the information that a sizeable group of earliest Christians perceived that Jesus claimed and showed himself to be truly divine by appearing resurrected to them” (p. 120).

Andrew Ter Ern Loke, Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens with a diagnosis. Scholars look at the same evidence and reach opposite conclusions. Why? They start with different assumptions. This book defends his prior work and answers his critics.

The kernel of the debate

Loke names the structural pivot. Citing Anthony Giambrone, Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, he writes:

“Concerning the question of exalted mediator figures, ‘which in many ways is the true kernel of the debate,’ I have defended my argument that the acknowledgment of Christ as being on the Creator side of the Creator-creature divide in 1 Cor 8:6 (which, as explained in ch. 2, implies the same divine status as YHWH) and preexistent in the form of God in Phil 2:6 surpasses those of exalted figures such as Adam, Moses, Enoch, etc. in Jewish texts.” (p. 129)

Two scriptural anchors carry the load. 1 Cor 8:6 places Christ on the Creator side of the divide. That implies the divine status of YHWH himself. Phil 2:6 makes him preexistent in the form of God. Jewish texts exalt Adam, Moses, and Enoch. None reach this. The earliest Christians agreed on it widely, even though they were strict Jewish monotheists.

How each chapter answers its opponents

Chapter 2 rejects the Greco-Roman comparison from M. David Litwa, Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University. Even granting some Gospel distortion, other evidence still anchors Jesus’s divine self-presentation in history. Chapters 2 and 4 then take down the mythicism of Richard Carrier, an independent ancient historian trained at Columbia. They also answer the agnosticism of Raphael Lataster, the “idealized human figures” reading from Daniel Kirk, and the mixed-Christologies claim of Matthew Larsen.

Chapter 4 settles Mark 10:18 and other disputed Synoptic passages by filling in the historical background. Against Larry Hurtado, formerly Emeritus Professor of New Testament at the University of Edinburgh, Loke spells out how the earliest Christians came to believe Jesus had risen. Chapter 3 then defends multiple, independent attestation across the Gospels and Pauline letters.

Old sources, real evidence

Two skeptical complaints recur: the sources are old, the evidence is poor. Loke answers both. The Christian church clearly began in the first century. Reliable sources point to one trigger. Groups claimed to have seen the risen Jesus shortly after his crucifixion. No first-century document hints at any other explanation.

On age, Loke notes two different gaps — between source and event, and between source and us. Only the first matters:

“Reliable evidence does not cease to be reliable just because it is old.” (p. 130)

Inference is how history works

Skeptics complain that arguments like the 500 witnesses in 1 Cor 15:6 rest on inference. Citing Michael Licona, Professor of New Testament Studies at Houston Christian University, Loke replies that all ancient history does. Pauline authorship of 1 Corinthians rests on inference. So does our trust in Pliny, Tacitus, and Josephus. Inference is not a weakness. It is the way history works.

Loke turns this against Jens Schröter, Professor of New Testament Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. Schröter says historical tools cannot reach reality “behind the sources.” Loke counters with causal pathways. Historians look at the evidence, rule out other causes, and figure out what really happened. By that test, the Jewishness of Jesus and his death and resurrection are all basic historical facts.

Why naturalistic deflations fail

Psychological explanations of resurrection-belief, pursued by Dale C. Allison Jr., Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, fail on several fronts. They misuse the psychology literature. Their analogies miss key differences in topic, persecution, and fraud. They blur seeing a Jesus-like pattern with believing one has seen Jesus. Victims of mass hysteria usually gain insight and recant. Here, no one recanted. Suggested parallels like Sabbatai Zevi fall apart under scrutiny.

The thesis to be explained

Loke restates the datum. Early, independent sources show that the first Christian leaders agreed widely. They agreed Jesus was truly divine. They agreed he was dead and then seen alive by groups of people. The question is how, under persecution and inside strict Jewish monotheism, they came to that conviction. Loke’s answer:

“the best historical answer is that a sizeable group of earliest Christians perceived that Jesus claimed to be truly divine and showed himself to be truly divine by appearing resurrected to them, and that such events would have been required for the origin and development of divine and resurrection Christologies in the first place.” (p. 132)